BENGALURU: The Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company has filed a petition before the Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) to consider flat rates for its telescopic tariff plan, which means that the electricity bills are going to get bigger.
The new petition has been filed before KERC after the electricity company asked the regulatory body to consider a hike of 80 paise towards power tariff across consumers to mitigate its loses. Currently, the BESCOM has fixed rates based on the power consumption pattern of a domestic consumer. The current telescopic tariff plan is variable in nature, i.e. `2.70 is charged for consumption of 0-30 units. From 31-100 units of consumption it is `4 for the urban areas.
BESCOM said, “The company is fast losing high tension and industrial consumers who are now preferring captive generation and open access power purchase lured by lower tariffs. For 2011-12, the company lost around 43 million units as the HT consumers quit. By March 2016, an estimated loss of 1,200 million units is being anticipated.” The HT consumers bought each unit at `6.22 on an average which helped the electricity supply company to provide cross-subsidy to the poor consumers. With the HT consumers leaving the grid the company is now burdened with the rising cost of subsidies. The exit of HT consumers has raised the estimated cost of loss for the distribution utility of more than `800 crore. A BESCOM official said to maintain this losses the electricity supply company has proposed a hike of 80 paise of which 33 paise is due to exit of HT consumers.
The flat rate of charging the telescopic tariff slab is also due to the losses incurred by the power distribution utility. High tension consumers with load above 66kv, buying power under the open access scheme had to pay a surcharge, part of which goes for meeting the cross subsidy.